Dr Syed Mehdi:
Hello, my name is Dr Syed Mehdi. I'm the Chest Consultant and Lung Cancer Lead at Lancashire Teaching Hospitals NHS Trust.
Today, I'm going to briefly talk to you about being able to maintain and improve a good quality of life for our cancer patients. The way I look at it is, there are various phases during which we need to of life for our patients.
One of the important phases that we see as Chest Consultants is pre-diagnosis and post-treatment. During the diagnostic stage, it is important to maintain a good quality of life but also, be able to manage their symptoms to get to the diagnosis and be given treatments thereafter.
Once they have had the treatments such as surgical treatment or chemotherapy, or radiotherapy treatments, it also becomes important to be able to maintain their quality of life, but also to be able to address the symptoms as they come along.
We do a holistic needs assessment, but we also try and optimise their chest condition, and to be honest, their medical condition, so we can give them a decent quality of life, and also be able to control any symptoms that come during this journey. What is very clear, is quality of life matters most to our patients, and therefore it is our role to ensure that we help our patients in this aspect.
I would strongly encourage everyone to participate in the Cancer Quality of Life Survey to improve our pathways, but also for us to be able to give better care for our patients. Thank you.
